SEO – R.I.P. in 2014?

Will SEO really find its final demise in 2014 as predicted by Adam Torkildson, one of the best minds in the SEO industry?

So, will SEO Die in 2014?My unqualified answer is a big NO.

In an article entitled “The Death of SEO: The Rise of Social, PR, and Real Content” written by Ken Krogue and published by Forbes datelined July 20, 2012, Torkildson predicted the death of SEO within two years. The article caused quite a stir in the industry and set the internet community buzzing with varied views and discussions on the topic even up to this day.

Reading the intriguing title of the article alone gave me the goose bumps. As an internet marketing consultant, I was more worried about all the hard work and the tons of knowledge and experience on SEO I have acquired going down the drain in a flash – or rather, a flush. But after reading through the whole article, it finally sank to me that what Torkildson meant is that the SEO industry will merely undergo a major transformation and Google will be the one to make it happen through changes, which the Big G will force into the industry. And true enough, 6 months later Google came up with a series of Panda and Penguin updates that will forever change the way SEO is done.

About Pandas, Penguins, and Cracking the Secrets of the Algorithms

Google and the other search engines uses spiders or search engine robots to crawl and prowl the internet in search of data each armed with a proprietary algorithm that determines how each of the collected data will be indexed and stored. The functions and properties of these algorithms are known only to the search engines and are kept secret from the public and from each other for obvious reasons – anyone who discovers the secret behind the algorithms will be able to game the search engines and manipulate content to get it to land on top of Search Engine Result pages.

Wanting to impress their clients and gain an edge over their competitors, cracking the secret became an obsession for the SEO specialists who had to rely mostly on their observations and experiences to narrow down their SEO strategies to those that work best and bring results with the search engines. It was not long before a standard set of SEO techniques that works was adapted by the SEO industry which unfortunately resulted in people creating content for the search engines and no longer for the consumption of netizens which they should be meant to be for in the first place.

Google, on the other hand, always steps in every time anyone comes close to discovering the secrets and makes the necessary updates every time they notice people using this knowledge to gain the advantage of landing their content at the top of search results. These updates are what are now popularly known as the Pandas, Penguins, and various other names such as Boston and Florida in 2003.

What Google merely wants

It is really not Google’s wish to kill SEO and put a plug to the industry. In fact, it believes SEO is necessary to help people find good content. It wants people to write for people and rank content according to how other people value them. That is why the latest Panda and Penguin updates use a more advanced algorithm that analyzes not only keywords but the content of whole web pages as well. It has also injected a social dimension to the way it values content by giving more weight to social mentions more than the back links.

So, will SEO Die in 2014?

My unqualified answer is a big no. It will merely transform into a more meaningful and more fruitful endeavor. For as long as search engines continue to exist, SEO will continue to be there but this time to help clients provide consumers with content that really matters to them and not for the consumption of search engine robots. To sum it up, the age of real public relations work, social interaction, and quality content has finally dawned on the SEO industry.

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Paul Agabin Paul Agabin is the Founder and CEO of Wooka Interactive. He is an internet marketer based in the Philippines which deals with varied topics such as local industry news, seo strategies, content marketing, inbound marketing, social media management, website reviews, and the like. You can contact him at 0917-5069839.